Created attachment 90116[details][review]
include only one copy of VERSION in tarball
Seems like adding VERSION to EXTRA_FILES was an overkill.
Can you guys confirm that the patch fixes the problem? It seems to work fine here.
Note: you'll have to re-generate the tarballs with "make tarballs"

Thanks, Patrick. Fix committed.
commit 507c2356e3caa3b7da98787ae2de96c7bca0089e
Author: Emil Velikov <emil.l.velikov@gmail.com>
Date: Mon Dec 2 19:42:51 2013 +0000
automake: include only one copy VERSION in tarball
The VERSION file is tracked by git (git ls-files), thus
adding it to EXTRA_FILES will result in a duplicate copy
within the final tarball.